ZHIBEK SATENOVA: All your poems are written in free verse, but they have distinct rhythmic patterns. Is this pronounced rhythm the result of a collaboration of your poet and musician personas? If so, does your musician persona influence your poetry in other ways?  

CORBIN LOUIS: I don’t think of my music and poetry as differentiated by personas. Rather poetry and music are both sonic abilities that use different registers to accomplish the same goal of ripping open the heart in favor of connection and catharsis and mystery and heightened perception. My writing is a way to express the telepathic and healing power of rhythm. Even bugs have hearts. The heart is at the core of existence, and its steady beating is the basis of our survival, communication, and joy. In other words, rhythm is life, and poetry or music is a valuable extension of life, desire, and hard-won lessons. Imagine a giant pulse beating down and shooting us into the next moment and the next and into each other, and the sun going around and around at a clean pace. And within the pattern, maybe a few people can get in unison and recognize something in each other, and maybe their recognition leads to respect and safety. I believe the rhythm and subsequent physical synchronization that poetry enables can result in that kind of fleeting but life-saving unity. It’s lofty to think that words mixed with tempo can connect people in an evolutionary way that facilitates love and protection. But this is what I believe, that writing is a cosmic superpower. I have been to open mics where a poet’s vulnerable words make apparent how necessary it is to shut down the constant and nearby misogyny. And songs by Yves Tumor freed my mind, so I could dress how I want, use make up, embrace all the uncomfortable joys of my sexuality. On top of that, the rhythm one must practice while writing poems and songs is like morning tai chi, cardio—it’s good for the circulation. All to say, poetry makes me a healthier more loving person.

Since I started writing at age 13, music has always informed my poems with the punch of drums and the sweetness of melody. I discovered poetry through hip-hop and the beatniks, artists like Tupac and Allen Ginsberg who used breath and tempo as a relatable and pleasurable means to unpack disturbing truths to challenge the status quo. It’s my goal to carry on that tradition of sound meeting rebellious thought. To wield sonic waves like an iron pipe that shatters personal delusions and the lies of patriarchy. I want my poems to read like a mixtape of punk rock and jazz. A scream in the face of hegemony. Or a croon that says “I love you and the gratitude keeps me alive.” I’m not sure where poetry ends and where music begins. Both have vocal moaning and syncopated booms. Instead of viewing music and poetry as different styles, I wonder how the two can inform each other. What happens to the emotion in a word when it’s drowning in 808s? What benefits does a quiet room give to comprehension? For instance, I can read more thoroughly in silence, but I can cry harder when a piano is playing. That’s what I mean by using poetry and music as different registers. Today I’d like to whisper and meditate on a riddle. Tomorrow I will wail in the dirt and repeatedly bang my head on the trees. Both are great ways to face yourself and learn.

ZS: Continuing our conversation about the musicality of your poems, in “Sugar, Sex and Zig-Zags” the theme of smoking is expressed not only with vivid images but also with frequent alliteration that creates a trance-like effect on the reader. Did you intentionally create this effect or did it happen intuitively?

CL: I’m so flattered by your perceptive and true reading of this work. For sure trance is a central mechanic and concept in these poems. They are odes to surviving addiction, which is a euphoric stupor that’s both epic and eviscerating. Likewise, these poems are also cautioning and grieving a particular kind of American trance: a suburban hypnosis of fast food, TV, and shopping. Americans are often mesmerized by excess. In the early 2000s, doctors prescribed my peers absurd and lethal amounts of narcotics, Xanax and Oxycontin. So, I grew up watching my best friends literally stumble through their lives, zombie walking, drunk driving to 7/11, and then vomiting to death. Now I’m writing to document, commemorate, caution, celebrate, grieve, and laugh about these North Seattle experiences of altered consciousness.

But trance has more dimensions than being a deadly stupor, as does drug culture. Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg talked a lot about drug-induced trance as a form of meditation, ego-death, and spiritual liberation—which it is. Trance can be simultaneously dangerous and life-saving. Both stupid and revelatory. A drug trance can contain real creative enlightenment but also result in addiction and overdose. So my goal is to celebrate and mourn these contradictions with a poetics that beholds the paradoxes of surviving addiction, its destruction and joy. 

Quite frankly I had a lot of fun smoking heroin and watching my friends self-medicate to death. I don’t want to forget how much fun it was. The neurological damage will hurt too much if I do. But it was also thoroughly tragic and unnecessary, had there been more community solutions for mental illness. Writing forces me to confront questions like this: was taking drugs actually romantic and fun? Do we romanticize dangerous events as a way to delude ourselves and repress the pain? Yes. But also smoking drugs just feels good, and humans are apparently willing to die for indulgence and that seems important to consider. If any of these interview answers have seemingly strayed from the question, then I attribute it to trance, drifting, and letting go of inhibition in favor of honesty. But your observation is dead on. It’s my intention for these poems to be a drug-frenzied trance, a confusing and ecstatic blur. Flow and prayer. A trance means being hypnotized, so acknowledging the trance with written evocations means waking up from the trance, and slipping into another kind of lucid trance. I’ve been sober for 3 years now. Poetry is a way to remember what happened, the horror and fun, why I shouldn’t go back to being high.

ZS: Your choices regarding punctuation and capitalization also caught my attention. In your poems, you predominantly use commas and em dashes, and seem to use capitalization as a kind of end stop, instead of periods. How do you prescribe value or power to punctuation in your poetry?

CL: I omit periods in these poems with hopes of evoking a flow state and sense of never-endingness. These are poems that reflect on drug-induced trances and the ceaseless aftermath that follows. The open-ended line is meant to create a musical continuation into the next experience and thought, like a sensory avalanche, like a gorgeous night that turns into an infinite hangover. The em dashes break up the sentence, give a slight pause, then jerk the line back into an incessant rhythm. That is, a rhythm which emulates the constant and nauseating motion of life. Our pains and hearts just beat on and on and on, and the resilience needed to keep up is rather insane and glorious.

Similarly, the commas in these poems indicate that the sentence is not over. Without the periods, I am saying America’s opioid crisis is running on, and must be dealt with because it’s at the front door, just knocking and knocking all night. I’m attempting to show the chaotic blur of life, how memory melts into hazy longing, how a few bad decisions carry over into lifetimes of illness that now must be tended to. As for the capitalization, you are exactly right. The large letters start a new thought to give a semblance of stoppage, breath, and rest, while still allowing the poem to be a dog off the leash. 

ZS: All your poems contain vivid and unique imagery. For example, in “Star Tooth Banner,” there are the lines: “The answers are obvious: rotting brains and // white marble…” These two images seem to be incompatible: the rotting brain is something formerly alive, soft, but also disgusting, while white marble is lifeless, hard, and considered by many to be attractive. Why do you juxtapose such contrasting images?

CL: This is one of my favorite lines I’ve written because it attempts to do what I believe poetry is best at, which is to split language in half, crack open cognition, and create a tunnel where the reader gains access to psychic understandings beyond logic. “Rotting brains and white marble” is a line of nonsense that reaches towards an emotional understanding of an impossible question: “why did you choose the needle?” The poem asks why my best friend ended up killing himself with heroin. ‘Rotting brains and white marble’ does not directly answer to the genetic disorder, intuitional failings, and community neglect that contributed to my friend’s death. Nothing does. Why is my friend dead and why am I suicidal? There’s no scientific answer, so I respond to the question with an incompatible and striking image that functions as a visual mantra made to symbolize the wet, bleeding, hard emotion. This line is like a Zen riddle that answers the mystery of life with more mystery to show that knowing is a dead end. Instead, intuition and spirit can guide one to the lovely nowhere. Uncertainty is the plane that people must walk forever. I hate the mountain. I am terrified. I love the mountain.

Poetry is a magic trick of language that makes the reader ask, “What does this even mean? Is this nonsense or deep insight?” And I think the answer to that question is both. And neither. Poetry is not journalism or 1 +1 =2. There is not always linear logic to a poem. It’s more like a verbal tesseract that tries to pull the reader up into a wider dimension, but fails because a tesseract is a 4-dimensional shape we can’t comprehend. But still the poem adamantly suggests the paradoxical world, the possibility of a 4th dimension. Maybe the higher dimension exists or maybe it is the poet’s desperate fantasy for something more. And maybe, if you’re lucky, you can rip open your brain and glimpse the poem’s tesseract. 

“Rotting brains and white marble” shows there is no clear answer to the reality of overdose. Life doesn’t allow easy answers. To read poetry, you must interrupt, imagine, and make up your own little story to comprehend the poem. For me, “rotting brains” means my friend was born with a mental disorder in a world obsessed with pharmaceuticals and TV. And “white marble” symbolizes cocaine. Or like you note, the clean, smooth surface of the white marble juxtaposes the rotting brain to say: some people have dysfunctional, crumpled brains and some people have pristine, working brains, and that’s just how it is. There are a multitude of meanings. And that’s why poetry is so rich and enlightening. Because a poem can house an infinite number of questions, realizations, and mental corridors.

ZS: You mention teeth in two of your poems: “Instructions for Living” and “Star Tooth Banner.” In both poems, teeth seem to be somehow related to power: either a “one star-tooth sky” watching from above, or the speaker “remove[s] [their] teeth to prove all coronations are fake.” Do you associate teeth with wealth and power or is there different symbolic meaning to these images?

CL: I was thinking about teeth in a few different ways, firstly, as a visceral image that cuts into the page and conveys a feral sentiment. I’m always writing to say that life bites hard, and I’m biting back and wrestling on the ground and spitting and digging my fingernails into the meat of reality. Like a lot of poets, I cycle certain words and imagery throughout my writing. Sylvia Plath re-used the words “hospital” “white” and “gown” constantly. Her repetition served a philosophical adamancy that illness must be paid attention to. For me, my poems cycle through bones, brass, teeth, dirt, and pills. Also cement and rust. These are simple and sharp words that help paint the floating junkyard in my brain. Living with chronic pain feels like crawling through piles of teeth and broken trumpets. Imagine being in a swamp filled with cracked televisions and bullets. This is how I experience my body and corner of America. A gorgeous wasteland. Strip malls and abandoned fridges everywhere. So often I am hurting from migraines and barely surviving this vivid world. Teeth seem to convey my overall and constant feeling of sharpness, and tearing and fighting.

I love your reading of teeth as power and wealth. I’m going to take credit and say, yes, this meaning is embedded in the work. My poems discuss the reality that America has no free or universal healthcare. I read a tweet that said “In America, if you work a job, you get to keep your teeth.” This is painfully true. Either you’re able-bodied and lucky enough to find a job that provides insurance, or else you simply can’t afford treatment.  Teeth are for those who have the financial privilege to maintain them. Throughout my years of drug use, I’ve spent a lot of time with people who’ve ruined their teeth from soda, cigarettes, heroin, and meth. Those are all ubiquitous habits that I associate with an American psychosis, a trash-fever pioneered by our leaders Philip Morris and Coca-Cola. Meth especially ruins your teeth, because it stops saliva production, which is essential to self-cleaning. The junky’s green and brown mouth means that clean teeth are prominent emblems for the healthy and rich. Power is often predicated on poverty and illness. And power in any form should be constantly questioned and rigorously challenged. If the collective doesn’t investigate and hold power accountable with public poems, demands, and actions, those who have such power will chew up everything.

In a poem, a single world like “teeth” can carry universes of evocation and possibility. When writing of teeth, I think of America’s military-industrial complex smiling at the world through the mask of Hollywood veneers. I think of my ex-girlfriend who had to crowd-fund a root canal, only to die of cancer a few years later. Teeth are a big deal, and I think the word just hits the page so hard. Fangs. Blood. Shakespeare and his line, “There’s daggers in men’s smiles.” Teeth summon the rawness of humanity. But here in particular, when I said, “I will remove my teeth to prove all coronations are fake,” I meant that I will do the most extreme things to prove kings and hierarchies are fake bullshit, to protest against the ruling class with an image of ripping out one’s teeth. A kind of nod to Thich Quang Duc. 

ZS: The juxtaposition of beautiful images such as a “red kite that goes up and up” with the dark or seemingly grieving mood present in your poems reminds me of Dostoyevsky. All his novels contain a big amount of pain and suffering that make them so bleak. Dostoyevsky himself wrote: “Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart.” However, Dostoyevsky also believed that beauty can save the world from suffering. What, in your opinion, could improve the world or America in particular?

CL: Again, I’m deeply flattered by the depth of your engagement with these poems. Indeed, suffering at the far edge of destruction and reaching towards salvation are the stakes of being alive and writing about it. So I’m going to be dramatic and say that to have my lifelong writing practice so honored by the Angime editors is lifesaving. Like I’ve mentioned, engaging with literature in a sincere and public way gives me a reason to stay sober and healthy, and this kind of publication is really fucking sacred. So, thank you. Similarly, Dostoyevsky and his untamed pessimism helped me survive a suicidal episode after a 2016 surgery. Particularly, Notes from Underground showed me that even if you are sick, depraved, and suicidal, you are not alone, other people have been through total hell. Instead of killing themselves in a motel closet, they talked through it and found strength in the sick poet legion. Instead of die, you can write, write, write, and use language to reframe the solitary pain of disease as part of a disgusting joke and a shared reality. In this way, discussing bleakness gives me hope. Dark and brutal writing taught me that brokenness is at its core connectedness. A lot of us are fucked up, thoroughly. So I believe this kind of disturbed literature can and does improve communities by offering heightened honesty and understanding.

Books about insurmountable illness remind me that being a disabled addict is not a unique experience that I am solely to blame for. Two decades straight, I buckled under depression, chose drugs, and irreparably damaged my nervous system. But reading poems taught me that such behavior is actually common. Disability should not warrant jail, poverty, and death, and is, in fact, a redeemable phenomenon caused by a socio-historic domino effect that must be investigated in order to change. American institutions play a significant role in perpetuating disease. Like Purdue Pharma that sold teenagers mountains of pills. Or PepsiCo who has insisted for 30-years that Gatorade is a healthy sports drink. That shit is diabetes in a single-use death bottle. Americans are living in a gas powered war machine that maintains its common sense logic of borders, guns, and racism by subsiding oligarchs that in turn pay people so little they become too exhausted to organize against hierarchy. And as I’ve suggested, bleak and grotesque poetry can combat that situation by challenging those in power and asking working people to rethink how they vote, buy, donate, and care for those outside their immediate experience. Don Mee Choi is a painfully excellent example of this kind of rebel poet. A writer who is unafraid to examine U.S. militarism and then poeticize the research with discordant phrases and ugly visuals that shock English open. And as she pries into the language and history, it becomes unavoidably clear that America is built around a lethal white supremacy that we can either destroy or be destroyed by. Poets like Don Mee unequivocally improve the intelligence and memory of a culture. Other revolutionary writers like Angela Davis might argue that the best way to improve America is to abolish it in the name of a more horizontal democracy. I agree.

Until then, small and gradual things can be done to improve America. To stop its death cult frenzy of school shootings, fracking, and billionaire wealth hoarding. Creating worker unions at Amazon and legislating a 70% capital gains tax for millionaires would be a worthwhile starting point for the progress of American life. I spent the summer of 2020 marching through Seattle to protest our constant police killings. The collective demand was that the city government defund police by 50% and allocate the funds towards affordable housing for people of color. Instead, our president has increased police and military spending. But poetry is a way to fight on and echo the calls for peace. Literature is a psychic space to examine what’s broken and dialogue about alternative futures. I want to live in a safer world. Even if fighting for it feels like ripping out my teeth.

ZS: If you had a chance to be reborn as a bird, what bird would you be?

CL: I would be an American Bald Eagle. But I would change my name to just Eagle.